China's State Grid is a sleeping artificial intelligence giant - SupChina

China's best known AI companies are Sensetime, Megvii, Cloudwalk, Yitu, ByteDance, and the BAT companies -- China's first generation of internet giant: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. But there's another giant of artificial intelligence that is rarely discussed in the same breath as the companies mentioned above. The state-owned electric utility monopoly State Grid Corporation of China (hereafter State Grid) is the largest utility company in the world, ranking second on the 2018 Fortune Global 500 List. Less celebrated is that State Grid was the only Chinese company ranked in the top 20 in artificial intelligence (AI) patent applicants, per the World Intellectual Property Organization. In an article (in Chinese) published last year titled "State Grid Corporation of China: A hidden giant in AI," Lǐ Shāng 李熵 gives a portrait of a company whose AI initiatives could change the world.